How do you deal with clients with naive expectations?

Sounds like this guy either doesn’t really know what he wants, doesn’t know how to communicate what he wants, or both.

Ask for a reference track and spend some time with him identifying the things he likes about it and the things he doesn’t. (If you haven’t already).

If this is pop music then there are really no standards for how things should sound. Mostly everything is VI’s, samples etc so there’s no real benchmark for how any given source should sound. It’s not like an acoustic guitar, or piano etc where you can, somewhat, objectively say what sounds good or bad. This makes it really challenging, and unfortunately yes you need to be producer as well as AE for it to work.

Also, as others have said, mixing for more pop genres is very much about sample layering/replacing, blending reverbs and delays, sidechain compression, lots of distortion etc. It’s very different from mixing a more organic genre.

Fire the client.

^^^^^^^^. Also great advice.  The type 2 client will turn your life upside down, and make you hate music overall and rethink your career choices...

Josh is braver than me.
Of course this was the first thing I thought. Waaaayyy back!

The cheapest clients are the ones who need the most automation. I only need to do it on guitars and basses now to ride up notes. the complex two detector compressors save my ass. Otherwise, MDWDRC2 on guitars and whisper to scream vocalists, Molot on basses and wimpy drums, Drum Leveler on drums, Oxford Dynamics on normal vocals, Kotelnikov GE on busses to even out their scrappy performances. Weiss DS-1 can be used if they want to sound digital but I need to buy that one. Pro Audio DSP DSM is amazing at taking the edge off. Molot GE sometimes to de-wimp stuff, go on basses and two bus. Presswerk if I need something crazy and don't care about phase.

If anything is fake, I process it to hell and don't care. If anything interesting happens, I'll fader ride it up. I hate when I get a million different little tracks that don't do anything for the song and they want to pay 100 bucks for a mix. Like... they get what I can do in a few hours.

I've tried to set ultimatums and "rules" over the year and have failed miserably. I kind of take things on a case by case basis now. It's rarer these days for me to do work for new clients. It's mostly people I at least know or have been recommended by other people I've worked with for a while. I'll give two examples of situations I dealt with last month.

First one was someone I went to college with, does mostly music lessons now but has been trying to record some of their students to help them with the writing process. They send me things to mix occasionally, some of them are really strait forward and easy, a few have been on the verge of being frustrating with the number of annoying back and forths and mix notes. Bigger picture, they're all great people, recognize that they're new to the whole recroding/production thing and want to get better. They're aware of their "shortcomings", and I think a lot of the time where things get annoying and frustrating for me, are just those people trying to take this seriously and get better. Most of the issues are purely communication issues, they're new to this and don't know how to articulate some pretty simple concepts sometimes. I try to be patient and remember this, because they're all good people and it's coming from a good place. We're all learning, and I'll continue to try my best to be patient with them because they deserve it and are worth it.

I don't mind those kinds of clients, I'll put in the extra time. The second situation was a repeat client that I had mixed a group of four songs for a long time ago. That first go was incredibly frustrating, they were difficult but I begrudgingly got through it. They apologized profusely after that and I chalked it up to a learning experience and thought we would communicate better the next time. The next time came last month, they sent me two more things to mix that were incredibly simple and strait forward. There were lots of timing and instrument tuning issues, and I asked about that stuff as soon as I opened up the session, as I was already giving them a massive mix discount and wanted to be strait forward by saying "if you want me to fix any of that, I'm going to charge my full mix rate because it's going to be a lot of work". They said they weren't worried about it, so I did the mixes. They got them, first email back basically says "wow, what's going on with the tuning on the guitars and vocals? Can you go back through and fix all of that". At that point, I realized I had screwed up and should have passed on the work because I knew which way this was about to go... I reiterated that I was going to charge the full mix rate if I needed to go through and "try" to fix that stuff (timing issues could have been fixed with some elastic time tweaks and copy/pastes from other sections of the song, but none of it was on a metronome. Pitch issues weren't going to be able to be fixed in this genera when you're singing out of tune to an out of tune guitar). Next email back to me basically said "but we're SO close, can't you just go back through and do a few tweaks?". I politely declined and said I was sorry, but I was going to have to pass on the project due to time constrictions.

It just wans't worth the fight to me for the second situation. I'm a pretty good judge of people at this point and in my gut know what to expect when things start to go into motion. I don't follow my gut enough, but that's another story, lol... Most clients are going to be difficult at some point on every project. I've gotten better over the years at talking a lot before we even agree to things about establishing what everyones roles are and what people expect of each other. I'm starting to ramble, but what I'm getting at is: You have to decided what you want out of every project and what you're willing to put up with. A lot of the people I work with are worth the extra stress because as annoying and frustrating as it can be, it's a bi-product of passion. I'll fight through the passionate bullshit every time, it's worth it and the clients will respect you more for it. On the other hand, some people are just assholes and will take advantage of every little thing they can. It's not hard to pick up on that energy, even remotely though emails. Your guts going to let you know when that kind of crap starts to creep in. I don't know what your "why" is for this particular project or what you're wanting to get out of it. Regardless, you need to force the client to start communicating better and give you more specifics if you're going to move forward.

Based off what you've said, my gut is giving me red flags. I would have politely told them "sorry, but I'm going to have to pass on this project". I had a top tier mastering engineer do this to me a couple of years back when I was being too annoying with my note on my mixes. It really pissed me off, but it was a learning experience on how to gracefully and professional deal with an avoided shit storm. He masters for some of the biggest artists in the world and could tell, just from a short email after his first master pass, that I was going to be annoying and take up a lot of his time (and to be fair, I probably was). I wasn't worth the extra time that he probably didn't have, and gave me my money back and moved on while keeping it professional. Again, learning experience.

I would write them a short and polite email, and give them their money back. Doesn't sound like the kind of person that's worth it, as they're always going to be pissy and negative.

While you’re not dealing with it here one of the worst situations as a mixer is when someone sends you great tracks, tracks that when taken on their own but just don’t fit together. It’s like they created different parts in complete isolation, that central lesson of tracking, mix it as you go. I have never been against experimenting in the studio, but I can’t tell you how often I have gotten tracks where I can’t help but think I’ve gotten pieces of different songs.

Completely agree and relate to everything you wrote. The only reason I agreed to this was because I wanted to pickup Pianoteq 8 lol. But yeah - I’m to the point where I’d rather not deal with shit than to make a trivial amount of money. Plus, for my own sanity, I just don’t have the energy to deal with demanding clients that aren’t paying enough to cover my mortgage for the month. I can save my anxiety for higher rollers.
I’m in the same place with recurring clients…and this guy is very polite. I’ve had difficult inexperienced client many times where I worked myself into a panic because they were being ridiculous - then I told them straight up that they were crazy (not those words) and they backed down and were ultimately happy…but they were paying enough to try and save it.

What genre are you referring to?